Twitter’s New COO Sells in Wilmette

List Price: $1,449,000
Sale Price: $1,400,000
The Property: Two weeks before he was named chief operating officer of the San Francisco-based microblogging service Twitter, Dick Costolo sold his 12-room home in central Wilmette…

By Dennis Rodkin

Published Sept. 14, 2009

List Price: $1,449,000 Sale Price: $1,400,000 The Property: Two weeks before he was named chief operating officer of the San Francisco-based microblogging service Twitter, Dick Costolo sold his 12-room home in central Wilmette.

Costolo was a founder and the former CEO of the Chicago-based Feedburner, the original RSS (Real Simple Syndication) provider, which Google bought in 2007 for $100 million. According to Brad Spirrison, the technology columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, Costolo had mostly been working at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters until he left Google over the summer. Spirrison wrote that Costolo’s move to Twitter, announced in early September, meant that he most likely won’t be back in Chicago to start another company here. The sale of Costolo’s Wilmette house would seem to cement that notion.

Built in 1925, the house is a classic red brick colonial set sideways to the street on its quarter-acre lot. It has five bedrooms, a formal foyer–living room–dining room floor plan, and, according to the listing sheet, a newly finished basement level that includes a wine cellar, a media room, and other spaces. According to the listing, there were recent renovations to the kitchen and breakfast room (done by the architecture firm Morgante Wilson) and to all five bathrooms. The house is in a superb location, on one of Wilmette’s old brick streets: it’s across the street from Central Elementary School, a few blocks west of Gillson Park and Lake Michigan, and another few blocks east of the village’s downtown.

Costolo has been traveling in France, so I have not been able to reach him for comment. He was an early investor in Twitter, where he tweets as dickc; scroll back through his tweets and you will find several about his house sale and subsequent move. (And maybe this is a good place to remind you that I tweet as DealEstate.)

Price Points: Dick Costolo and his wife, Lorin, bought the house in July 2003 for $1.1 million. Because I couldn’t reach them or their real-estate agent, I can’t say how much they spent on renovations, and so I can’t determine whether they profited on the sale.